■ David W. Dorman had a relaxed style and spoke with a Georgian
drawl; his keen wit and considerable charm put fellow workers at ease and
enabled him to speak easily with the people he supervised. He gained a
reputation for being able to build businesses when he increased Sprint
Business's revenue from $4 million in 1990 to $4.5 billion in 1993.
The greatest challenge of his career came in 2000, when he took on the
task of rebuilding AT&T, a company whose total stock value had
fallen from a high of $110 billion to a low of less than $11 billion in
the late 1990s.

SPRINT

Dorman graduated with a bachelor's degree in industrial management
from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1975, just three years after
entering college. His big break came in 1981, when he became the
fifty-fifth employee hired by the company that would later become Sprint.
He worked various management positions for the company until he was
appointed as president of Sprint Business, where careful marketing led to
rapid growth; the division eventually comprised 10,000 employees.

David W. Dorman.

AP/Wide World Photos

.

PACIFIC BELL AND SBC

In 1994 Dorman was hired away by Pacific Bell, a division of Pacific
Telesis Group, one of the Baby Bells spun off from AT&T in the
early 1980s. At the age of 39 Dorman was the youngest leader ever at any
of the Baby Bells, having become Pacific Bell's president, chief
executive officer, and chairman of the board. The company was quite large,
with 50,000 employees, 10 million household customers, one million
business customers, and $11 billion in annual revenue.

In 1997 SBC Communications bought Pacific Telesis Group, and Dorman lost
his exalted position, becoming SBC's executive vice president. Many
observers thought that his move to PointCast in late 1997 was motivated by
his frustration with having to answer to corporate leaders who did not
share his management views, as well as by his desire to be the leader of a
company. But Dorman stated that his wife and
three children had not wished to move to SBC's corporate
headquarters, demanding instead to stay put in California; his
family's wishes motivated him to accept the position of president,
CEO, and chairman of PointCast, an Internet information provider. Dorman
received a $1.5 million signing bonus from PointCast and a $250,000 salary
in 1998. He found PointCast to be confused, pushing too many different
kinds of data; he gave the company focus by instituting an emphasis on
news reporting. In spite of Dorman's efforts, however, PointCast
ran short of capital in 1999, and in April of that year Dorman accepted
the position of CEO at Concert Communications.

AT&T

Concert Communications was a joint venture by AT&T and British
Telecommunications. The companies' hope was to build Concert into a
worldwide telecom service, but the project was doomed by unrealistic
expectations from the management at both AT&T and British
Telecommunications; in 2000 Concert failed. In December 2000 Dorman was
named president of AT&T, becoming responsible for customer
services, AT&T labs, network services, and global business
ventures. AT&T had been without a president for over a year.

In 1998 AT&T's market capitalization was $110 billion, and
the company was growing in new directions, having become the
country's sixth-largest provider of Internet services. In 2000
AT&T carried more data traffic than voice traffic for the first
time. On October 25, 2000, AT&T began reorganizing itself into four
segments: AT&T Wireless, AT&T Broadband, AT&T
Business, and AT&T Consumer. When Dorman became president, the
company was chaotic, with communication between departments sorely
deficient; in one instance, sales representatives were selling goods that
the divisions responsible for production did not have.

Dorman spent much of 2001 fostering cooperation among those departments.
He devoted his time to clarifying the motivation behind the changes
AT&T was undergoing, such as the May 25, 2001, purchase of
NorthPoint Communications, a network service provider, as well as the
spinning off of AT&T Wireless to become an independent company. The
revenue from Dorman's responsibilities totaled $40 billion, out of
$66 billion altogether for AT&T; in all Dorman supervised over
82,000 employees.

In February 2002 Dorman was appointed to AT&T's board of
directors, a step toward his becoming the company's CEO. During
2002 Dorman strove to modernize AT&T by replacing 48
"legacy" telecommunications switching systems with
up-to-date systems that used Internet protocol. He hoped to use the
Internet for routing voice telephone calls as well as data communications,
thus eliminating the need to pay local telephone companies access fees in
order to use their lines. Additionally Dorman directed the marketing of
bundled services to customers, which proved especially attractive to
businesses that wanted a wide variety of services and could find them all
available at AT&T. The company sold these bundles of services to
corporations such as Hyatt Hotels, MasterCard, and Merrill Lynch.
AT&T introduced ultra-accurate voice-recognition software that
would replace operators at some companies. Dorman spent $200 million to
develop new customer services, and he had all 4,300 customer-services
personnel retrained to be more helpful. On November 18, 2002, AT&T
Broadband merged with Comcast Corporation, and the AT&T CEO and
chairman C. Michael Armstrong left AT&T to run the new Comcast;
that day Dorman became CEO and chairman at AT&T. For the year
Dorman was paid $6.5 million.

In 2003 AT&T became the largest provider of Internet services and
doubled its total number of local-service customers to 28 million. Another
52 "legacy" systems were replaced. The company introduced
software called "underware" to handle basic computer tasks,
and Dorman puckishly suggested that customers should not leave home
without their underware. He negotiated a merger with BellSouth that would
have put him in a position to become CEO when BellSouth's leader F.
Duane Ackerman retired; however, the merger talks fell apart on October
28, 2003, when Ackerman decided the $25 apiece price for AT&T
shares was too steep. That year Dorman cut 8,500 jobs, or 12 percent of
AT&T's workforce.

In 2004 some observers still expected AT&T to fail, but its
situation was looking up. Dorman had carefully paid down
AT&T's debts, giving the company a good debt-to-income
ratio. Furthermore, the company's stock was once again increasing
in value, giving AT&T $15 billion in stock capitalization.

See also
entry on AT&T Corp. in
International Directory of Company Histories
.